Price Controls
Unless you are from Mars, you probably know LeBron James is a free agent, being courted by a number of teams, ultimately deciding on Miami over his home town and former team in Cleveland.
This has been an odd auction for his services, because except for some tax issues (which certainly may have been a factor in going to Florida), price controls in the league effectively cap how much James can be paid. And given his talent, it was clear that every team would be willing to pay him the max. This has led to offers based mostly on non-monetary factors, with Cleveland mainly taking the Glenn Close approach from Fatal Attraction, basically saying it would have to commit suicide if LeBron breaks up with the city.
Many have commented on how much Cleveland, economically, had riding on James and that it may well get the biggest economic benefit, bigger certainly than Miami which has fairly indifferent and easily distracted fans, of any of the teams in the auction. But with price controls, Cleveland lost because it was not able to bid for LeBron's services what he was really worth (in fact, it was pretty clear that all the teams involved expected to have a huge consumer surplus from LeBron's acquisition, since his value to any team seems to be higher than the salary cap).
By the way, speaking of surplus or lack thereof, my belief is that New York has continued its tradition of offering long-term lucrative deals to disappointing players. Having watched Amare Stoudemire for seven years, I can say that he is fully poised to be the next Stephon Marbery for the Knicks. He can be brilliant, and he is very talented, but he has focus issues that are not going to be enhanced in New York and at times was thrown off-kilter by the media pressure in Phoenix where the press is a cupcake compared to New York. He is not even much of an upgrade from David Lee, but he gets paid a lot more guaranteed money.
